


Slow, It's Earthquake Weather

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His mother warns him, she says, <i>don't let that boy get too attached to you.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Slow, It's Earthquake Weather

-

 

Okay, no, it's stupid shit, right, but Percy does occasionally know how to do research -- albeit, usually it's nothing more sophisticated than entering stuff into Google and hoping for the best. Once he even used Yahoo Answers, but that shit didn't end well because nothing gets trolled harder than Yahoo Answers, so it doesn't really count.

Anyway, so maybe he got curious and looked up the laws for New York. Technically, what he's doing isn't statutory rape, not in any of the three degrees, because he isn't eighteen yet, Nico is older than eleven, and there are fewer than four years between the two of them (three, technically, but Nico's birthday was in May, so until August, they're only two years apart.) It seems important to make this distinction whenever his conscience gets squirmy: just because they fall in between the legal lines doesn't make it not wrong on some cosmic level or another.

There's the whole cousins thing, for one, which, whatever, half-bloods have been ignoring that little detail since the dawn of time, why start now. For real, Silena and Beckendorf's parents were _married_ to each other (and siblings, which made their kids ... well, a lot of illegal things,) and it didn't stop them from Frenching each other by the lake on Friday evenings.

Exactly. So.

Plus, point of interest, the legal age of consent in New York is seventeen, so the fact that neither of them make that cut-off is like a double-negative: it cancels each other out, because kids will be kids and somehow it magically doesn't count as sexual contact until your seventeenth birthday, what the fuck ever, man, he still thinks he's lucky he's going to make it to his sixteenth.

The days following the whole debacle in Manhattan are a kind of mess, what with a whole bunch of god-kids dying dramatically and statues beating each other up and the Empire State Building glowing blue, and for awhile, everybody is just kind of staying with everybody else, and his mom is teaching Paul how to feed a bunch of hungry heroes (hint: those microwavable mini-pizza bagel things? are the _shit)_ and Rachel is crashing on the couch for a few days until her eyes stop glowing and she can go out in public again and Nico's in his room, because, quote, "your mom promised me cake" and Percy can't deny the kid his cake. He kind of did come in with a timely rescue at a very crucial moment in the plot.

And it's summer, and technically they're supposed to be at Camp, but Percy's kind of had it up to here with that world and hasn't had a summer to himself since that first ugly thing tried to eat him on the bus when he was eleven. He _likes_ having time to himself to do dumb summer kid things, and the Camp could suck it (and he means that in the politest way possible, because he does actually owe Chiron and Mr. D and them a lot,) he's done what they wanted him to do, so now he was taking a vacation to do fuck-all for once.

Fuck-all includes exactly what you think it would, because, dude, Percy's fifteen and he's kind of like that all the time these days, regardless of impending Olympian disaster. That's not something they ever cover in the Odyssey or the Iliad, or maybe they couldn't find something that rhymed with "awkward boners" that still conveyed the truth depth and meaning of Greek tragedy.

So Percy's fifteen and well underway with this puberty thing, and Nico's thirteen and just starting it, with a voice gone all wobbly and ears like Dumbo and hands way too big compared to the rest of his body (Percy leers and says, "you know what they say about that," and then pretends he didn't just do something that creepy, because all self-control around Nico is shot, always has been.)

His mother warns him, even, says, "don't let that boy get too attached to you, Percy -- he is looking for someone to depend on and you can't let it just be you," and hey, when the hell has he ever been good at listening to people's advice about Nico? Bianca said, "look out for my brother," and Percy said okay and then let Nico fall into Minos's trap and almost get killed about four different ways before being locked up by his father, all before he even stops being twelve, and hey, yeah, okay, Percy's got unresolved guilt issues. Whatever, he's earned them.

There could have been so much here that isn't -- it may be water under the bridge to Nico and his mayfly perception of time, but Percy hasn't forgotten the eleven-year-old boy who looked at him with a furious, naked hate, the same boy who sold him out to Hades less than a month ago for the promise of approval -- and there are so many ways this all could have gone wrong, so it seems to Percy like something that should be celebrated, the fact that he's still alive, he lived up to everyone's expectations, and now this kid still isn't done with him, but instead expects _more,_ like saving the world wasn't enough. Now he's here, somehow, a former threat and former competition for a shit prophecy, turned friend and surrogate little brother (although, hold that thought.)

In the beginning, it doesn't even really feel like sex. It was more of a "yo, bro, this is how you do things," helping out kind of shenanigan, and hey, Percy's never had siblings before Tyson and has this new tendency to overcompensate when Nico's involved, so it seems like a great plan at the time: Nico's had to figure enough stuff out on his own, this at least he can help him with. 

It starts when they wake up, morning wood just a shrug, yeah, don't worry about it, you're not a freak, kid, it's always like this, and Nico skips the etiquette part of waiting until he's in the shower, which, _awkward,_ but Percy can deal. It's a, "I'll ignore it if you do," kind of thing, and as such takes him awhile to notice that the kid is trying to _mimic_ him, since he's so busy trying _not_ to notice: he gets the hint when Nico's head pops up over the side of his mattress one of these mornings and he's going, "you're doing something different. Show me."

Okay, yeah, Percy looks. Hey, you would too, man, if Nico climbed up next to you and tugged his willy out of his shorts just like that. Percy's pretty sure he actually double-takes, because what in the name of Hermes's golden sandals, no, you don't _do_ that, but he looks anyway, is pretty sure he'll never get the image out of his head. Nico's looking too, so, hey.

That evolves into kissing some other day, which is weird, but no weirder than the rest of it: them sitting together on Percy's narrow twin bed, shoulders sleep-hot against each other and knees hooked unconsciously around the other's, and Nico just leans over, catches his lower lip and then the upper and then Nico's whole mouth is shock, hot-wet-sour, around his, and it's the hottest thing that happened to Percy to date, the feeling of his mouth _full_ of someone else's tongue, and he almost bites clean through Nico's lip when he brings himself off.

Nico, the stupid little punk, looks smug about it, so Percy sticks his smelly, sticky hand in his face, because again, no self-control. 

At thirteen, Nico is slender everywhere, limbs cut thin without an ounce of fat on them, all smooth little kid muscle and those crazy big, warm hands and this propensity for licking at his mouth like a puppy. Percy's never given much thought to kissing before -- been busy, thank you! -- but when Nico hooks a hand around his head, fingers lazily scritching at the dip in base of his skull, and pulls him in, he feels like they can kiss like this for hours, no problem, just chasing each other's mouths around with bites and slow, soothing strokes of tongue. It makes him think all kinds of crazy things, like putting his palms around Nico's flat hips and holding him down, keeping him down so he can have that mouth whenever he wants it.

He's the first person Percy's ever really kissed (because Annabeth and Rachel had both kissed _him,_ without giving him a whole lot of say in the matter.) It should feel awkward, kissing a boy, but it isn't, really -- no more awkward than getting turned into a guinea pig or getting filmed in the Tunnel of Love by the gods of Olympus or having a demonic cheerleader blame him for the destruction of the Goode High School band room. 

It's just kissing, and just touching, palming each other's skin while sleepy and clumsy in a way that isn't particularly sexual, for all that it's, like, _sex,_ or, at least, turns into sex or whatever. It's just ... comforting, to be curled all around another person, to feel them, warmer than you ever thought they'd be, to tuck your feet up against their skin and listen to them complain in your ear.

Sally catches them like this once, after they'd fallen back into a drowsy half-sleep, hands up each other's shirts and faces tucked into each other's necks and thin summer sheets rucked up around their feet. She laughs loud enough to wake them up, and the instant they spring apart, she goes, "I should have taken a picture and blackmailed you forever," and closes the door again. She makes pancakes later, because, yeah, she's kind of the coolest mom ever.

The best part of the day is easily right after Sally and Paul leave together for their writer's workshop class -- Sally has work afterwards, and Paul runs errands like a good wife does, so Nico and Percy are alone for up to four hours at a crack, and the instant the lock scrapes in the door behind his parents, Nico is a heavy weight shimmying into his lap, tonguing into his mouth in the way that drives Percy crazy, and it's the greatest idea anyone ever thought of, every time.

And -- and -- it's _Nico,_ which seems the most accurate word to describe it: Nico's knees bracketing his hips and the way his toes curl up almost involuntarily and the strange taste at the hollow of his collarbone -- a chemical taste, almost sulfurous, which is, "debris from shadow traveling," and Percy thinks there's probably no one else on earth who _tastes_ like shadows -- and the way he looks at him sometimes, like the sun, moon, and planets are gone and he can't see anyone but Percy.

So Nico just ... _stays,_ and Paul makes noises about getting him into this random-ass boarding school he knows up in upstate New York in the fall, except Nico's got to pass some kind of entrance exam first and since the kid pretty much learned his multiplication tables from playing cards and didn't learn to read until it was strictly necessary for video games, it might take some work.

Percy's never been good at the book stuff, so the practical demonstration is in order: they hit up the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan and are relatively unbothered, since most monsters are keeping their heads down while the power structure in Olympus shifts and resettles in the aftermath of Kronos. Nico learns Percy's abridged version of the abridged version of the last seventy years of history, the names of presidents and controversial icons and wars fought on foreign soil because the gods were meddling bastards.

And the whole while, Nico's been standing at his shoulder, going, "show me," and he learns more practical things, like how to whistle and how to tack "in the bedroom" to the end of every fortune cookie to make it _hilarious,_ and how to do the Soulja Boy, and still, Nico's insistent, saying, "show me" as Percy breaks eggs over a skillet for scrambled eggs on toast (between the two of them, they can eat half a loaf of bread in one go) and saying, "show me," when Percy's at the sink cleaning up after (which is awesome, because who doesn't love it when someone else does the dishes?) and somehow, because he doesn't really understand how he gets himself into these situations, he's on his knees, one hand on Nico's thigh and Nico's eyes are huge and oil slick dark and his mouth is gasping, "show me," so Percy does, because to Nico, this is just how things are.

Afterwards, Nico half-climbs, half-falls into his lap and thumbs at Percy's swollen mouth with the manner of someone obsessed, and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, and it's okay, because Percy can hold his breath for a really long time and who needs oxygen, really, when there's this small, skinny thing in your lap who thinks a blowjob from you is pretty much the shit, and it's the most powerful feeling in the world, and it was worth saving Olympus to feel like this.

And yeah, he's not a complete douche: there's a part of him that knows he shouldn't be letting it happen, part of him that watches enough after-school specials and paid enough attention to second-grade assemblies on what constitutes a Bad Touch and thinks back enough to Bianca saying, "look out for my little brother," to know that it doesn't really add up, to remember all those things and then here's Percy, the pot, kettle, and color black.

But another part of him, the part of him that acknowledges that all Percy's conscience is good at is getting kids killed and is just as desperate to get away from it for awhile, whispers nasty in the back of his mind, _well, it's not like you can fuck him up more._

He never does forgive himself for this thought, especially not after the end of August, when Annabeth gives him this cupcake/hockey puck hybrid thing for his sixteenth birthday and kisses him all awkward closed-mouthed and shit and Percy kind of forgets about Nico for awhile, because this is, like, _destiny,_ and Percy's whole life has been dictated by someone else's master plan, and his happily ever after has always included her.

Nico's used to it, anyway, the people who turn away from him and leave, so. Whatever, he'll be fine.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
